Google, IBM, NVIDIA Launch OpenPOWER Consortium

(The Hosting News) – A list of high profile tech companies on Tuesday announced the formation of the “OpenPOWER Consortium,” an open development alliance basing its designs on the POWER microprocessor architecture from IBM.

Forming the alliance, aside from IBM, are companies such as Google, NVIDIA, Tyan and Mellanox.

Primarily, the group’s formation makes IBM’s POWER hardware along with the corresponding software available for open development, with the OpenPOWER Consortium providing the firmware with the basic chip software.

In a press release, IBM Senior VP and Group Exec Steve Mills noted the founding members “represent the next generation in data-center innovation.”

“Combining our talents and assets around the POWER architecture can greatly increase the rate of innovation throughout the industry. Developers now have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time. This type of ‘collaborative development’ model will change the way data center hardware is designed and deployed,” Mills went on to say.

NVIDIA and IBM, meanwhile, will specifically integrate POWER ecosystems with Nvidia’s CUDA GPUs.

The announcement is somewhat similar to the Open Compute Project, previously formed by social network Facebook with the intention of making data centers more efficient and less expensive via the sharing of readily available open source designs.